Focal Points Blog

A government building in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital. (Photo: Beshr O / Flickr)

It’s often written that the Islamic State fills a need for young men adrift on the stagnant sea of the Middle-Eastern ― and world ― economy. It not only provides a paying job (and purpose in life), it offers a benefit that may be central to recruiting.

On October 28, Frontline ran a useful overview of the Islamic State titled The Rise of ISIS. It shows how the Islamic State developed as a reaction to oppression of the Sunnis by Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia government in Iraq. Or, shall we say, in the time-dishonored tradition of many revolutions, an over-reaction ― a descent into an orgy of revenge that threatens the new government itself.Read More

In 1991, when they disbanded the Warsaw Pact, the countries of Central Europe officially declared their independence from the Soviet Union (though the breaking of the bond really took place two years earlier). This newfound independence did not, however, translate into a common voice or common position based on history and circumstance.

The region almost immediately broke into several rival camps. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary created the Visegrad group and positioned themselves as the most likely to succeed (as members of NATO and the European Union). Bulgaria and Romania scrambled to present themselves as second-tier candidates for European accession. The Baltic countries struggled to escape their post-Soviet identity. And Yugoslavia simply fell apart.Read More

President Obama’s war against the Islamic State will represent, by a rough count, the eighth time the U.S. air-power lobby has promised to crush a foe without setting boot or foot on the ground. Yet from World War II to Yemen, the record is clear: such promises have invariably been proven empty and worthless.

Its capitol, Ouagadougou, rocked with a week of large and militant demonstrations, Burkina Faso, formerly known as Upper Volta, is in the midst of major political turmoil that could spread to other West African countries. “Burkina Faso” translates from the local language as “Land of Upright Men.” What is known to date is that after a week of angry demonstrations in Ouagadougou in which the Parliament was stormed and set on fire, Blaise Compaoré, the country’s president for the past 27 years, the target of the demonstrators, was forced to resign and give up power.

Compaoréwas in the process of trying to amend the country’s constitution so that he could extend his rule and become, like his Cameroonian colleague, Paul Biya, another French puppet, president for life. This apparently was more than the country’s 17 million people – 60% of whom are under the age of 25 – could take.Read More

The Poles call them umowa śmieciowa or “junk contracts.” If you’re young and lucky enough to have a job in Poland these days, it’s likely to be short-term and come without benefits. Ten percent of young people (up to the age of 25) are working in the black market, and another 25 percent have part-time or short-term work. Of the rest, most have job contracts that provide little in the way of security.

Meanwhile, the youth unemployment rate in Poland has averaged around 30 percent over the last 17 years. Though it’s dropped to around 23 percent in August, young people are happy to get any kind of job. A huge number have simply given up and taken advantage of the freedom to travel throughout the EU. More than two million Poles, many of them young, have left the country for better opportunities abroad.

Slawomir Rakowiecki has been a long-time trade unionist in Poland, part of the first generation of Solidarity activists. He has been involved in the union in Warsaw and at the provincial level (Mazowsze), and his focus has been the transportation sector. A nationwide railway strike last year and several other actions have boosted the unions‘ profile in this sector.Read More

SIS is not a mere terror organization, but an insurgency that follows a classic “Clear, Hold, Build” strategy. The aim is state building as the very name ISIS suggests. However, holding territory implies provision of services to the governed population such as food, energy and water and possibly health and education. The longer it holds territory, ISIS needs to worry about much more than just funding military operations. It now rules over roughly 8 million people. It does not assume a veneer of statehood for nothing; at its home base in Al Raqqa it has interfered in school curriculums, repaired roads and launched a consumer protection authority for food standards.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is implementing the construction of more than 1,000 new settlement apartments in East Jerusalem. In the New York Times, Jodi Rudoren reports that it’s “a move certain to ignite international outrage as well as to exacerbate fissures in Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition.”

The announcement, along with a parallel push for new roads and other infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank, came amid escalating protests and violence by Palestinian residents of Jerusalem that many see as the stirrings of a third intifada, or uprising.

Right-wing Israeli ministers have been pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to speed construction in what most of the world considers illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but moderates in the government have said this would only deepen Israel’s isolation.

In the New York Times, James Kirkpatrick writes that a “series of episodes over just the last four weeks is raising new fears about the capacity of the extremists who call themselves the Islamic State to catalyze so-called lone-wolf attacks, conceived and carried out by individuals or small groups around the Western world who may have little or no connection to the Islamic State.” These include:

… Australian authorities arrest a ring of 12 accused of plotting daring murders, including a public beheading.

In Canada, a gunman assaults the Parliament building and kills a soldier guarding a war memorial, and a motorist strikes two soldiers, killing one — in both cases, perpetrators with tenuous links to Islamist extremism.

And in New York City, a man wielding a hatchet attacks four police officers in Queens, slashing one in the head and another in the arm.

They are called the decret generation. During the Communist era in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu issued Decree 770 in 1967 making abortion and contraception illegal except under certain circumstances. The Communist leader wanted to radically increase the population of the country. People with money or political influence found a way around the regulations. But those who did not expect or could not support their new babies often dropped them off at the nearest orphanage.

That was the fate of Vasile Mathe, a soft-spoken man who works as a school mediator in a small Transylvanian town outside of Campia Turzii.

“Until I was three years old, I was raised by a lady working in the maternity ward,” he told me in an interview in Cluj where we sat in a café with his friend and translator Dan Iepure. “She wanted to adopt me. But it was impossible because my mother wouldn’t agree to the adoption. We had to wait until I was 10 years old. So, I was sent to an orphanage because of this disagreement with my mother. I ended up staying there until I was 19 years old.”Read More

Iranian politicians sometimes refer to the United States as the Great Satan. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, used the term iblis (a devil in Islam) to characterize the United States. But to many Americans, Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader, was a demon himself. Not only did he preside over the hostage crisis, he executed thousands of political prisoners not long after he assumed power, and he empowered terrorist acts by Hezbollah.

But when it came to state-sponsored violence, the Supreme Leader definitely had his limits. In his book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Book, 2014), Gareth Porter wrote about Khomeini’s reservations about chemical and nuclear weapons. In a recent article for Foreign Policy titled When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes, he expanded on that.Read More

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We sniff out issues hiding in the foreign-policy forest and haul them back to the laboratory for inspection. We examine the anterior, posterior, and underside of an issue, as well as its shadows.

This blog provides a commentator with an opportunity to express his or her convictions more forcefully than may be appropriate for an article. If you have unique insight into a foreign-policy (or affairs) issue, please feel free to write a post and send it to editor Russ Wellen at [email protected]